


plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

by honey_wheeler



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-05
Updated: 2011-08-05
Packaged: 2017-10-22 05:48:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/234547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ariadne and Arthur and the difference between what’s dreamed and what’s real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

It’s symbolic, when you think about it. Of what they do, of how they work, always below the surface, inhabiting the interstitial spaces.

There’s no sex in real life. They don’t kiss, they don’t flirt, there hasn’t even been so much as a touch. Ariadne only knows the feel of his hands - the weight of his body, the sound of him breaking - in the shadow world of dreams.

*****

Their first kiss had been stolen, in a way. She’d kissed him willingly enough, but under false pretenses. She wouldn’t have thought anything of it if Arthur hadn’t grinned at her after, looking like a boy who stole a cookie from the jar. He’d been a distraction – from the job, from the novelty, from Cobb who’d been occupying most of her mental real estate. But it was nice, for all that.

*****

Small jobs with Eames filled the time and dulled the edge of reality coming after so much dream time; a bank code here, a name there. They’d fallen into a routine fairly easily, even without the gravitational pull of Cobb’s presence. She built, Arthur was on point, Eames finagled and extracted. It had been three jobs before Arthur touched her in anything more than a perfunctory, professional way. Five jobs before he kissed her again. And another seven jobs after that before he made his move.

“What took you so long?” she’d said once he finally did. The hotel lounge was one of her better pieces, dark and enveloping. The perfect place for him to crowd against her in a secluded booth while Eames worked over the mark at the bar. The perfect place for him to suck at the pulse behind her ear and snake one hand up her skirt to the edge of her plain cotton underwear. Too bad she hadn’t dreamed herself some nicer panties.

His fingers found their target. They circled and pressed. “I’m old-fashioned,” he’d said and she shuddered.

*****

There’s no denying the thrill of stealing moments on the job. Eames has a taste for the noir, which lends most of their assignments an air of intrigue. It’s like playing at being someone else, some character in a movie or a Raymond Chandler novel. It’s freeing. Until the time they forget themselves and Eames has to clear his throat three times before they break apart and remember they’ve got a job to do.

“I don’t recall a snogfest being discussed during the planning stages,” he says mildly, and that marks the end of the on-the-job trysts.

They could just transfer to reality. Neither ever suggests it, though, and she’s glad he doesn’t. She likes it this way, how sometimes she can’t remember which memories were dreamed and which were created. Dream moments slither away when she tries to focus on them, steady in her periphery but dancing away when she looks at them directly. Everything swims below the surface, warm and loose, like a pain that doesn’t hurt.

She builds them dreams instead. Sometimes they just try out what she’s building for a job, sometimes she makes them something new entirely. She’ll find herself suddenly on a beach, his sandy ankle against hers, or on a rooftop in the middle of some city that doesn’t exist, or just in a bed, already kissing him, already feeling his hands on her body like they’ve been there forever.

So far they’ve never gone deeper than one level. It would give them more time, but it seems extravagant, even arrogant somehow. And this way she still feels the residue on her skin when she’s awake, the cloudy memory of her body being stoked like a fire. It coats her teeth and gets under her fingernails. Any further and she might lose it, which would sort of defeat the purpose.

*****

“Do you ever have nightmares?” he asks once while she works on a model late at night, gluing and ripping out and redoing one particular part far more than strictly necessary. Old habits. There’s no need to design for beauty or meaning in these jobs, but sometimes she can’t help herself.

“Not anymore,” she tells him.

“But you used to.”

“Yes. When I was a kid, mostly.” She reaches for her knife only to find that he’s already picked it up and is holding it out to her.

“What were they of?”

“Being trapped,” she says. “Small spaces. Shrinking rooms that got smaller until I could barely squeeze out the door.”

“No wonder you became an architect.” She looks at him curiously. “Learning how to control and manipulate your environment,” he says in explanation. “Empowerment, agency, all that hyper-aware socio-babble.” She considers it for a moment and then makes an impressed face.

“Not bad,” she says. “Maybe you’re not quite as dumb as Eames says you are.”

“That’s just how he pulls my metaphorical pigtails,” Arthur grins.

*****

They’re running out of time. They were greedy, once wasn’t enough. She knows the minutes are slipping away but his mouth is on her, his fingers inside crooked just so and she’s close, so close she can feel it in the back of her throat.

“Please,” she tells him. Her hands fist in his hair. She must be hurting him, but she’s past caring. “ _Please_ , I need…I’m-”

The air snaps, she splashes into reality even as she’s coming, her body jerking and sending her chair tipping to the floor. She does her best not to moan but the odds were against her. Next to her, Arthur hauls air into his lungs and looks smug. Eames pushes up from his chair across the studio and comes to stand over her, hands in his pockets, eyebrows in his hairline. He must have come in while they were asleep.

“Did you enjoy your, uh…nap?” he asks, clearly amused.

“Immensely,” Arthur says. If she weren’t so busy trying to catch her breath, she would throw something at him.

“I’d help you up,” Eames tells her, “but the floor does seem to be the best location for what you two have been up to.”

She finds enough breath to tell him to shut up.

*****

“Would it be different in real life?” she asks another time. They’re someplace tropical, some idyll she’d constructed from half-remembered pictures of Hawaii, Fiji, Bora Bora: white sand, blue ocean, a painfully bright sky. Their thatched-roof hut crouches over the shallows on cautious stilts so that when she raises her head from his chest, all she sees is water and sky in all directions. This is where she’d come if she had unlimited time and money for vacations. Well. She supposes she does, now.

“Would what be different?” His voice is languid, lazy. She isn’t used to laziness in men. Her classmates are always working until all hours, even when there’s no reason to, painstakingly constructing pointlessly detailed models or discussing theory in a caffeinated haze of design school pretension.

“This. Us. Sex.” She probably didn’t need to clarify quite so much. He thinks it’s funny, she can tell, but not in a mean way.

“I don’t know,” he answers. His fingertips skate up her arm to her shoulder, tugging on the ends of her hair, a tug she feels straight down into her stomach. “You’re the only one I’ve tried this with down here.”

“Seriously? You’ve never had sex in a dream before?”

“I’m usually on the job,” he reminds her. “And usually with men. Which isn’t to say I’d never go for a man down here, but it kind of blurs the line when they’re colleagues.”

“I’m a colleague,” she points out. He makes a face like he’s considering it.

“Good point,” he says. “Maybe Cobb’s just not my type.”

That makes one of them. Ariadne wonders about Cobb idly sometimes, what this would be like with him. But no, he’s too wounded, too complicated. Too gone, now that he’s back to his own version of real life, wherever or whatever that is.

“Eames, then,” she says, pushing thoughts of Cobb away.

“And ruin our delightfully unresolved sexual tension?” Arthur asks with a grin. “Now where would the fun in that be?”

*****

There’s nothing remarkable about the day or place. Nothing’s happened that might shift the dynamic or bring about a sudden impulsiveness, no near-death experience or narrow escape from disaster. One minute they’re about to part ways after a planning session, the next he’s wheeling around and asking her to dinner.

“Dinner?” she says dumbly. She’s surprised. Though maybe she shouldn’t be.

“You do eat, don’t you?” he asks.

“Of course.”

“So how about it?”

“I don’t know,” she hedges. “Don’t you think it’d be awkward?”

He laughs. “For what, our work relationship? I’ve already seen you naked. I even know what you sound like when you c-”

“Okay!” she interrupts. “Okay, but what if it’s different?”

“Only one way to find out,” he tells her, and then he’s kissing her for real, in real life, and it’s different but it’s not.

“Verdict?” he asks. She’s not sure if his voice is nervous under the devil-may-care or if she’s just imagining it.

“Different,” she says. “But still the same.” He smiles.

“Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,” he says. “The more th-”

“I know what it means.” She smiles to soften her words. Then she makes up her mind. “Dinner sounds good.”


End file.
